BJ Atwood-Fukuda, author of poetry and prose, will be reading from her recent work on Monday, August 6, 2018 at the Woods Hole Public Library at 7:30 PM.
BJ Atwood-Fukuda has an MFA from The New School and is a founding member of the New York workshop, Writing at the Crossroads. Her work has appeared in Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present (Scribners, 2003) and Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books (Subpress, 2004), as well as in American Letters & Commentary, The Mad Hatter’s Review, Tupelo Quarterly and The Wall (wittypartition.org), among others. She lives and writes in Spuyten Duyvil, NY (a section of the Bronx) and Woods Hole.
BJ’s reading this year–her sixth annual–will feature “TraumaDoll”, a fictiony “rant” (her word) about an incident she endured last winter. If time allows, she will also share the opening pages of a story in progress, “Nice Piano”. As always, she invites questions and comments from listeners.
Those who know BJ’s work agree that it does not lend itself to easy categorization. Some have called it “prose poetry”, as above. BJ favors the term “riff” to peg what she describes, “however poorly”, as the “mind-wanderings and thought-experiments” of an aging female character stopped in her tracks both by a rush of memory and by a fear of losing her mind. Plagued with anxiety about the smallest events of her daily life and most of what she sees and hears around her, “she” seeks clarity over certainty, even as she laments the insufficiency of language to achieve either one.
BJ has read several pieces in this vein from her work-in-progress, Trainwreck, in past years. This time, she offers a departure: a more traditional narrative form and voice, with multiple characters. For her, it’s an experiment.